Rain Dance (Tulsa Thunderbirds Book 5)

by Catherine Gayle

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  About this Book

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Roster

  Other Titles by Catherine Gayle

  About the Author

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the work of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.

  Rain Dance

  Copyright © 2017 by Catherine Gayle

  Cover Design by Kim Killion, The Killion Group

  All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any electronic or mechanical means—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without written permission.

  For more information: catherine@catherinegayle.com

  This one is for all my readers who’ve ever been victims of domestic violence or abuse. You’re not alone. And even if you’re living in it now, know that there is help, but no one can help you if you don’t help yourself. Please—help yourself. Find a way to get out.

  He’s in a drought. No rain. No goals. No women.

  She has what it takes to quench his thirst.

  Ethan Higgins, a defenseman for the Tulsa Thunderbirds, is in a rut. He hasn’t scored a goal in ages, and he hasn’t had a woman in his bed for even longer. The only thing in his favor is that he gets to spend time with his son when the T-Birds play at home on the weekends. Determined to be nothing like his abusive father, Ethan sets out to show his son how a real man behaves, and Natalie Turner gives him the perfect opportunity to do so.

  Natalie has nowhere to turn when her boyfriend gets physical with her, this time in public—at least not until Ethan steps in to offer her a safe place to stay. Wary of trusting anyone, especially another hockey player, and even more so one as rough and tough as Ethan, Natalie attempts to resist the lure she feels toward the protective man. When Ethan’s son does a Rain Dance, the skies open up. But will soaking their hardened and cracked hearts be enough to end the drought?

  BURY THE HATCHET

  SMOKE SIGNALS

  GHOST DANCE

  RITES OF PASSAGE

  RAIN DANCE

  Prefer to buy your ebooks in boxed sets? The Tulsa Thunderbirds series will gradually be released in boxed set formats. Look for TULSA THUNDERBIRDS: SQUARE ONE, a set containing Bury the Hatchet, Smoke Signals, and Ghost Dance available now. More boxed sets will follow.

  Want to join in the discussion? Join Cat’s House, a reader group on Facebook for Catherine’s books.

  Interested in buying your own customizable Portland Storm and Tulsa Thunderbirds jerseys, T-shirts, and more? Find out how here.

  “YOU CAN’T STEP on the lines, Dad,” Carter said, rolling his eyes and putting a shit-ton of derision into the handful of words, as only a seven-year-old boy could do.

  He wore a Thunderbirds sweater bearing my name and number. The sleeves were about three inches too long for him, but the length didn’t matter since he’d rolled them up to above the elbow to combat the sweltering heat.

  At the rate my son was shooting up, he’d outgrow this sweater and need the next size up before the season was over, anyway. He’d definitely taken after me in the size department. I hoped he wouldn’t pass the six-foot mark before he was ten, but I had no intention of holding my breath.

  I’d been almost six feet tall by the time I reached double digits in age. Too bad it’d taken until my late teens before the rest of my body had caught up.

  Summer was lingering in Tulsa despite the fact that we were almost to mid-September already.

  The entire state of Oklahoma was in the midst of a massive drought, even though fall typically brought a few thunderstorms. Not as many as we could expect in the spring, but hopefully enough to relieve the parched, dry earth.

  I kept waiting for them to arrive, but so far…nothing. Not so much as a drop. The grass on my lawn was looking as brown and dry as straw lining a barn stall.

  The lack of moisture only made everything about the heat seem hotter than ever.

  “What happens if I step on the lines again?” I asked absentmindedly. I wasn’t exactly thinking about following the rules of my son’s game, especially since he tended to change them on a whim.

  My thoughts were centered on the changes to our defensive system Tim Harvey, one of our assistant coaches, wanted us to institute for this upcoming season. Tonight had been the first time we’d employed it in a game situation, and it hadn’t gone well.

  At least we were still only in the preseason, though.

  These games didn’t count for anything that mattered. We just played them so we could learn the coaches’ new systems and get our skating legs back under us after the long summer, and so the coaches and scouts could see how some of our prospects and the guys down at the AHL level were progressing in their development.

  Carter let out an annoyed sigh. Apparently I wasn’t very smart, at least in his esteemed opinion, since I couldn’t keep up with his rules.

  “The fire-breathing dragon comes up out of the ground and blasts you into next year,” he said, his matter-of-fact tone further emphasizing my obvious idiocy. Clearly, based on his tone, I knew nothing about fire-breathing dragons, let alone the workings of a seven-year-old boy’s mind.

  Never mind the fact that I’d once been one, myself. A little boy, not a dragon. I’d only wished I were a dragon, because then I could have breathed fire all over my son-of-a-bitch father and saved both my mother and myself a hell of a lot of pain—both literally and figuratively.

  Too bad dragons didn’t exist in the real world, but only in the overactive imaginations of little boys. Either way, I intended to make damn sure that Carter never needed a dragon or anyone else to rescue him. He’d never find himself in a dangerous situation that he wasn’t fully prepared to face. Not if I had anything to say about it.

  “Maybe I want to step on the lines and bring out the dragon,” I replied, intentionally egging him on.

  “Only if you want to die.”

  “I don’t know. I bet I could train a dragon and fly on it.”

  “Real dragons aren’t like cartoon dragons, Dad.” This time, the eye roll was only evident in Carter’s tone, because he was too focused on the lines painted on the pavement to bother with craning his neck up far enough to look at me.

  “I thought Toothless was real,” I said in faux horror.

  My son didn’t worry about answering. He was too busy jumping over the white-and-yellow parking lines outside the BOK Center, because he was scared of dragons but not of me.

  Which, frankly, was how it should be, whe
ther dragons were real or not. No kid should be scared of their father.

  That was the one thing I’d promised myself when I’d married his mother and again when Carter was born—no matter what, my wife and child would never live in fear.

  I wouldn’t turn out to be like my father.

  I was not a monster.

  Maybe things hadn’t worked out between Kinsey and me, but it wasn’t because of violence. We just hadn’t been suited to one another. Lots of marriages failed, for any number of reasons. Kinsey and I were still friends, though, and we worked together to make sure Carter would always know he was loved.

  My kid would never fear me. That couldn’t happen. It wouldn’t happen. There were plenty of other things in this world that could scare him. I hoped he would grow up without fear, even if I knew that wasn’t realistic. No one was completely without fear. But at least I could ensure it wasn’t me who scared him.

  A car came around the corner, going too fast, and I instinctively reached out one of my long arms and tugged my son back against me. Turned out it wasn’t necessary. The driver must have seen us and swerved out of the way at the last second.

  “Daaa-aaad,” Carter complained. “You made me step on the line.”

  “Sorry for keeping you alive, kid. I’ll let you get run over next time, hmm? That sound better?” Because it very well might have happened.

  “Just don’t make me step on the lines.”

  I chuckled. “Got it.”

  I supposed Kinsey and I were doing a pretty okay job with Carter if he was more scared of releasing a fire-breathing dragon from the cracks in the pavement than he was of me. Although, maybe we should try a bit harder to instill a fear of crazy drivers in him. He needed to be aware.

  Since I didn’t have a wife anymore, Carter typically sat with one of the other guys’ wives or girlfriends when he was in town for my games. This time, he’d sat with Ravyn Nash, Drew’s wife, a woman he constantly told me was “cool” because she was a tattoo artist. She’d drawn a tattoo of our dog, Snoopy, on his arm using markers during intermission tonight to keep him entertained. I had a feeling he wouldn’t let me wash it off him for a week, but if we went swimming enough, the chlorine in the pools would probably take care of it before too much time had passed.

  We turned the corner of the building to get to the lot where the players all parked. About half of my teammates had left ahead of me, and several others were still in the building, getting treatment for various injuries or meeting with one of the coaches to go over their performance in the game tonight and find out if they were sticking with the big club or being sent back to their developmental team.

  The arena was virtually deserted at this point, other than a handful of workers who would be cleaning up until the wee hours of the morning following the mess the fans had left. That, more than anything, had to be why I was shocked to hear shouting up ahead.

  “Stupid bitch! What’d you do with the fucking keys?”

  And then there was the unmistakable sound of flesh striking flesh, followed by a sob that ripped my heart out because it could have come from my mother.

  My insides clenched into an all-too-familiar knot.

  I knew the voice.

  Couldn’t place it.

  Couldn’t think clearly.

  But I wasn’t a little boy anymore.

  I was a grown-ass man.

  And I’d made sure I was big enough and strong enough to fight back when my father decided to hit either me or my mother.

  In the back of my mind, I knew this wasn’t my parents, but honestly, it didn’t matter who it was.

  This couldn’t happen. Not in front of me. Not if I could do something to stop it.

  I couldn’t let it happen.

  I damned sure wasn’t going to walk away when my kid was watching.

  I hauled Carter into my arms because I could move faster carrying him than I could with him walking, and then I took off running.

  “The lines!” he complained, still not catching on.

  I ignored him. Someone was getting hurt.

  When I came around the corner, I skidded to a stop, in shock.

  Hayes “Haymaker” Lennon, our hotshot top-line left wing, was hauling his girlfriend, Natalie Turner, off the ground by her long, blond hair.

  Mascara-soaked tears left track marks on her cheeks, one of them bearing an unmistakable red welt, the result of a blow, which would soon turn black and blue.

  Briefly, her eyes met mine, then skittered away as if she wished she hadn’t seen me at all. She didn’t make a sound. Not so much as a peep, so eerily, unnervingly similar to the way I’d endured so many beatings before I’d decided to fight back.

  When Lennon reared back his fist to strike again, she winced and squeezed her eyes closed, Carter squeaked in terror, and I lost my shit.

  I HEARD THE thud of flesh meeting flesh, the little boy’s screams of terror, the shifting of gravel beneath bodies, the blaring of a car alarm going off, but I didn’t feel the blow.

  That was more of a shock to my system than anything else could have been.

  Hayes still had a grip on my hair. He dragged me back down to the asphalt with him as he fell. My skull cracked against something, and I forced myself to stifle a sob. Crying only made it worse. Hayes always seemed to get off on my tears; I tried to never let him see how much he hurt me because then he would only hurt me worse.

  Loose rock dug into my elbows, a sharp sensation that momentarily distracted me from the insistent throb in my head and the way my right eye was swelling shut.

  “Dad!” the boy screamed, and then Hayes’s grip on my hair relaxed.

  The release happened so suddenly that my head cracked back against the ground again, hard enough I wished I could black out.

  Blacking out was always easier. But I wouldn’t be so lucky tonight.

  “You son of a bitch,” Hayes spit out. But his voice was strained. Choked sounding, the way my voice did when he had a hand squeezing my windpipe. “Mind your own fucking business.”

  “It is my business if you’re beating up a woman in front of my kid.”

  “Fuck you,” Hayes shot back. “Take your kid home and worry about yourself.”

  I blinked until everything came into focus. But I could only see out of my left eye. The right one was already completely swollen shut.

  Ethan Higgins, one of the other guys on the team, had a hand around Hayes’s neck and was holding him down against the hood of a car. Ethan’s son was standing nearby, fat tears silently pouring down his cheeks. They glistened in the streetlights in the parking lot, twinkling like the stars overhead.

  No child should ever see this.

  I needed to end it, for him if for no other reason.

  I needed to end it for me, too.

  Because the longer this went on, the worse it would be for me in the end. I knew that well enough by now.

  My boyfriend was turning purple, but his wild eyes bored into me. This was all going to be my fault somehow. That was what he was trying to convey to me with that look, telling me my fate without bothering with words. His words were always hollow, anyway. The longer I allowed it to go on, the worse he would make me regret it.

  “Please, stop,” I said, but my words were barely more than a whisper, and Ethan didn’t act as if he’d heard me at all. I cleared my throat, agonizingly pushed myself up from the ground, and tried again. Every nerve ending in my body screamed in pain, but pain and I were old friends these days. I could handle this. I forced a strength I didn’t feel into my tone. “Let him go. Please.”

  My would-be rescuer didn’t even glance in my direction, never taking his eyes from Hayes. “Carter, I need you to be a big man for me,” he said to his son, his voice somehow calm and in control. “I need you to come get the keys out of my pocket, then take Miss Natalie and go get in the car with her. Got it?”

  “She’s not getting in your fucking car,” Hayes spit out, kicking wildly and making contact with Ethan’s
shins, but the larger man didn’t even flinch.

  I knew how much that hurt. I knew how much power Hayes could put into a kick like that. I’d felt those kicks all over my body more times than I could count. He especially liked kicking my ribs when I was curled in the fetal position.

  In fact, I felt those kicks now in commiseration with Ethan’s plight. My entire body curled in on itself. In panic. In fear. In preparation for the beating Hayes would give me once we were home again.

  He’d hit me in front of people a few times before, but it was never anyone who would have bothered to step in like this—it typically only happened when his best friends were over, and they were all drunk and maybe high. Those guys would never step in to stop him. They only egged him on.

  Sometimes, they would hit me, too. Hayes always seemed to like that. He would puff up like a rooster, his chest heaving with pride and excited breathing, while watching his best friends beat me up.

  He’d never fucked me longer or harder than he had the night he, Alex, and Jason had taken turns, with two of them holding me down while the third had lashed my backside with a leather belt. That time he’d even stripped me first, because he’d wanted his friends to see the red welts rising on my pale skin.

  Not that I’d ever had much say in the matter, if any. But I’d never gotten the impression that Hayes needed a reason to beat me, even if he typically gave me one just before he pummeled my body.

  They were at the house tonight, actually. Waiting for us to get home. Probably already drunk or high, or maybe both.

  The three of them had grown up together. They were practically inseparable. They did everything together, including beat up Hayes’s girl. They’d never given me the impression that I’d been the first they’d done this with—it hadn’t felt new—which made me wonder if they also had girlfriends that they all beat up, or how many other girlfriends Hayes had shared with them before me. I might have been the first, since we’d been together for so long. If there had been others, though, I was just the one he’d chosen to keep. Lucky me. The only thing he hadn’t allowed them to do was fuck me.